Today GI-ESCR’s Executive Director, Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona, participated in an online event on care work and gender justice in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic organized by Oxfam GB. The event convened three international experts and human rights activists and focused on the severe impact that the pandemic has had on care work, and explored the opportunities to take advantage of this historic opportunity to reorganize care systems and push forward innovative measures to recognize, reduce, and redistribute care as a public policy and a human rights issue.

In her intervention Magdalena explained how unpaid care became understood as a violation of human rights and highlighted the challenges and progress achieved in Latin American region to reduce and redistribute care. She emphasized, how the pandemic has disproportionately increased care pressures on women in Latin America, particularly for women from the most marginalized communities (indigenous, migrant and from lowest income strata) and the crucial importance of coordinating a series of social and economic policies to change social norms around the provision of care, but most importantly, to reduce and redistribute care work through public measures such as expanding the reach and benefit levels of social protection and gender-responsive public services and infrastructure. Magdalena also emphasized that policy choices to raise and redistributive revenues should also have an explicit gender approach. She mentioned, for example, the elimination of tax-related gender biases, increase taxation of capital and wealth, and avoid increasing indirect taxation.

She was followed by Rita Aciro-Lakor, Executive Director of Uganda Women’s Network (UWONET), who spoke about UWONET ground-breaking advocacy on care in Uganda, and the role of men as allies and champions in communities and government ministries in the country, as well as the successes achieved by her organization in raising awareness and engaging new audiences through innovative communications strategies on care work.

Finally, Thalia Kidder, Women’s Economic Empowerment Lead at Oxfam GB, presented the results of the research recently conducted by Oxfam and the many challenges, but also the opportunities that the current momentum presents for the development of responses to Covid-19 that consider the recognition, reduction and redistribution of care work as a key component of a just recovery. 

The event was moderated by Danny Sriskandarajah, Chief Executive of Oxfam GB, who concluded the session with a brief reflection on the importance of making connection of unpaid and paid care work and to take advantage of the new discourses on social justice that have regained interest in this issue to mobilize and realize conditions for the enjoyment of women’s rights.

You may find the recording of the event here.